The invention relates to a record carrier comprising substantially circular tracks situated concentrically around a point of rotation, the record carrier being divided into ring-shaped zones each comprising m tracks, with m being an integer, each track in a zone being subdivided into n sectors, with n being an integer which is constant per zone and increases according as the zone is further remote from the point of rotation, each sector comprising a header portion and a data portion and, in radial direction, the header portions in each zone being in line.
A record carrier of the type defined in the opening paragraph is known, for example, from U.S. Pat. No. 4,530,018. Such record carriers are often denoted by the term of zoned record carriers. A track number and a sector number are assigned to each sector, the track number denoting which track the relevant sector resides in, and the sector number denoting the location of the relevant sector in the track. A desired sector is addressed on the basis of the track number and the sector number assigned to this sector.
When a specific sector is to be sought to be read out or written, control systems in equipment which is coupled to the read/write device supply control commands in which the sectors to be read out or written are specified by their track addresses and sector addresses.
Due to the differences in the numbers of sectors per track, the (software) drivers for driving the device for reading and writing of zoned discs will customarily differ considerably from drivers for the device for the reading and writing of non-zoned record carriers for which the number of sectors per track over the entire record carrier is the same. For when designing the driver which sends the read and write commands to the read/write device for non-zoned record carriers, the fact that the number of sectors for each track is the same is often exploited.
This implies that existing drivers designed for read/write devices for non-zoned record carriers are often unsuitable for read/write devices for zoned record carriers. Making these existing drivers suitable then often requires considerable adaptations. This is especially disadvantageous in the case where the introduction of a zoned record carrier is desired as a successor to an already marketed non-zoned record carrier.